The Loggerhead Shrike, A Rare Opportunity, Part 3 0f 4

So, in Part 2, the Loggerhead Shrike was perched, obviously aware of but unperturbed by my close presence. It kept scanning the ground. I kept snapping photos:

The primary food of the Loggerhead Shrike is large insects, especially grasshoppers. As a matter of fact, a shrike staring down from a perch above is probably a grasshoppers worst nightmare. In the winter when there aren't many insects, the shrike has to depend on frogs, small snakes, lizards, even mice and small birds as a food source.

They are in every sense of the term a "bird of prey." They lack the talons of the raptors, so they catch their prey by the neck with their strong, hooked beak and sever the spinal cord. The shrike then impales its prey on a thorn (or barb wire) and uses its beak the way a raptor would use its talons.

Because of their method of impaling the prey, they are sometimes called Butcherbirds. This behavior may seem to some to be "mean." I have witnessed a fair number of predators taking down prey and it is always in some sense gruesome, but it is part of the cycle of life.

Anyway, I couldn't help but wonder if this shrike was staying so close hoping I would scare up something for it to eat… (to be continued)

This set of photographs was taken at the Roosevelt Park Trailhead on the Mission Reach of the San Antonio River on Thursday, January 2, 2014.